by Mike Markel
Back at the English Department on the third floor of the Humanities Building, I walked up to the receptionist. The department chair, Jonathan Van Vleet, must have told her about Austin Sulenka biting it this morning, so she wasn’t so chirpy this time when she recognized me and Ryan.
“Yes, Detective, can I help you?”
“Can you give me a room number for Suzannah Montgomery?”
She looked at a sheet of paper taped to the counter. “She’s in 325, but she’s not there now.”
“Know where we can reach her?”
“She’s in the conference room: 333.” She pointed across the hall. “She’s doing a thesis defense. Melissa Harmon.”
“How long will that last, do you know?”
She looked at her watch. “It started at 2:30. They’ll probably be finishing up in fifteen or twenty minutes.”
Ryan said, “Do you know if defenses are public?”
“Yes, I think they are.” She brightened up a little. She was the kind of person enjoyed helping people get where they needed to be. “Just go ahead and walk in.”
Ryan gave her a big smile. “Thanks very much.”
We turned and walked out into the hall. “Is that gonna freak out the student?”
“I don’t think so,” he said. “My guess is she’s already fully amped. If we don’t make any sudden movements, she should be okay.” He pointed to the detective’s shield around my neck. “You might want to put that away.”
I took it off and dropped it into my big shoulder bag as we headed toward the conference room. “You been to one of these before?”
“I saw a couple of master’s defenses—a brother and a sister,” he said. “And I did an undergraduate version of a defense on a senior project at BYU,” he said.
“Hey, I did a senior project, too,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“It was a math project. I needed to calculate what grades I needed in my last sixteen credits to pull up my GPA to 2.5 so I could graduate.”
He smiled. “Good for you.”
“I nailed it.” I turned the knob on the conference room door. “Ended up with a 2.51.”
The room was big, I’d guess forty by forty. Up at the front was a long conference table, with a student and three professors sitting at one end. The rest of the space was taken up with about thirty lightly upholstered arm chairs arranged in rows. There were three other young people, probably other graduate students, scattered across the rows.
“Excuse us,” I said as the conversation stopped and all eyes looked up at me and Ryan coming in and sitting next to each other near the back.
The conference room doubled as a storeroom. The perimeter was filled with mismatched file cabinets topped with cardboard boxes full of file folders. There were a few bookcases filled with what looked like old yearbooks and professional magazines. Up near the front, off to the side of the big table, was a battered wooden podium with the seal of Central Montana Junior College, which the school hadn’t been in more than a quarter century.
Written on the whiteboard at the front of the room was “Melissa Harmon Thesis Defense 2:30.” Melissa was a heavy-boned early twenties girl with a shock of curly red hair tied back and pinned down, a little too much rouge and bruise-purple eyeliner, and a freakish smile frozen on her face. She wore a conservative royal blue pantsuit over her big frame. Stacks of books five high were arranged on the table in front of her, like she’d set them up to withstand the attacks of the three professors. Which made sense, since they call this thing a defense.
I looked at the three professors: one old guy and two women. The guy was wearing a dark suit. He was maybe sixty, white haired with a pencil moustache. He was leaning back in his chair, doodling on a legal pad, looking up occasionally and raising an eyebrow, but mostly focused on his watch. My guess was he was there to sign—or not sign—a piece of paper after the defense.
The younger woman professor was doing most of the talking, so I assumed she was Suzannah Montgomery. She was forty, auburn hair pulled back tight and braided. She wore no makeup, but she smiled brightly and laughed every once in a while when she said something she thought was witty or funny or something. I didn’t get any of her jokes. They were all talking about a book by someone named Chopin.
I leaned over to Ryan. “Are they talking about the composer?”
He shook his head and whispered, “No, it’s an American writer. Kate Chopin. No relation.”
I nodded, unsure whether my question was smart or stupid. Ryan is very good about never making me feel ashamed about how broadly ignorant I am, especially about stuff you were supposed to learn in school. If you think about it, though, there’s no reason to be ashamed for not knowing who the hell Kate Chopin was, and whether she was the composer’s wife or daughter or whatever. Really, what you should be ashamed about is thinking that knowing who the hell Kate Chopin was makes you better than someone who’s never heard of her. That isn’t Ryan. He realizes he’s lucky to have had the time and the opportunity to find out who the hell Kate Chopin was.
The other woman professor looked late forties, with a pleasantly lined face and a spiky Rod Stewart haircut with two or three shades of blond streaks. She was full of dangly silver earrings with geometric designs that looked Native American, a bunch of silver necklaces, one with a crucifix, and two wrists’ full of bracelets, including chains, bangles, and a really nice Cleopatra five-row piece that was two or three inches wide. This woman didn’t say much, but when she joined in she was lively and animated, the silver jangling as she gestured.
The talk went on for a while. I didn’t understand a damn thing anyone said, except that it had something to do with a famous book this Kate Chopin wrote that’s been turned into a movie a couple times. The grad student was working hard to make it sound very important that we all understood how this one movie emphasized one thing in the book, but this other movie focused on some other thing. And she was way excited about how someone wrote some show about the book and put it on in Minneapolis and it was a major breakthrough because it had music and dancing in addition to the story from the book.
I was kind of moved by how charged up Melissa was about this whole thing, until I realized she probably wasn’t. Most likely, all I was seeing was adrenaline. But maybe there was some real connection to what she was blabbing about—or had been, some time ago. As you get older, it gets harder to remember what it was that got you excited about a goal when you were young. Melissa was still young.
After a few more minutes, the jangly professor asked the student to leave the room. The three professors stood up and huddled together in a corner of the room. They were deciding her fate. It took all of thirty seconds. There was a lot of head nodding. Then, they broke the huddle, and the jangly professor went to the door and told the student to come back in. Melissa looked like she was about to drop a major brick. She sat down.
The jangly professor gave her a big smile and told her she’d passed the defense. Melissa almost jumped out of her chair and immediately started crying and hopping around on her toes and hugging each of the three professors. The other grad students filed out as Ryan and I stood up. The old guy professor left, too, and then the younger one with the braid.
Melissa and the silvery professor went in for another hug. They held it for a long time, talking to each other with low voices. The professor rubbed the student’s shoulders, like she was massaging out the stress.
Finally, they broke the hug. The professor noticed me and Ryan. “I’m sorry,” she said with a happy smile, “is there something we can do for you?”
“Are you Suzannah Montgomery?” I said.
“Yes.” She was still excited for the student, still happy. “I am.”
“We need to speak with you,” I said. “I mean, when you’re done here.”
“Okay, sure.” She turned to Melissa. “I’ll see you at seven? My house?”
The student was still smiling, still bouncing, still crying. She wiped at her eyes, further
wrecking her makeup. She looked like a clown who’d been over-seltzered. She couldn’t speak, but she nodded enthusiastically, then gave the professor one more hug and bounded out of the conference room.
Suzannah Montgomery came over to us. “I just love to see this.” She was beaming. “So young, so excited.”
“Dr. Montgomery, my name is Karen Seagate. This is Ryan Miner. We’re detectives, Rawlings Police Department.”
Suzannah Montgomery’s smile started to unwind until only a little bit remained. “Is there something wrong?”
“We need a couple minutes to talk with you.”
“Of course,” the professor said. Now the smile was all gone, like she knew we were going to tell her something shitty. She sat down at the conference table and gestured for us to sit, too.
“I’m sorry about barging into your defense, Professor, but we wanted to catch you before you left for the day. I’m afraid we have some bad news.”
Her face began to contort in fear. “Is it Adam?”
“No, no, I’m sorry,” I said. “It’s about a student.”
She sighed with relief, her eyelids closing slowly. Whatever it was she was afraid we were going to tell her about Adam, whoever he was, it was real bad.
“One of your graduate students, Austin Sulenka. He was found dead early this morning.”
She flinched and her hand came up to her mouth. “Oh, no,” she said. “Oh, my God. What happened?”
“We’re not exactly sure. He died of asphyxia, in his apartment.”
“He choked on some food?”
“We think he was strangled.”
“Are you saying he was murdered?” She was motionless, her silver jewelry silent.
“Yes, Professor, that is what I’m saying.”
She began to cry. She reached into her bag and pulled out a pack of tissues. She wiped her eyes, then her nose. “That poor boy,” she said. “That poor, poor boy.”
I waited a few seconds as she tried to pull herself together. “Can you tell us about your relationship with Austin?”
She shook her head sadly. “Officially, I was his adviser. He was a student in three of my seminars, and he was working on his thesis.” She paused. “Strangled?”
“Yes,” I said. “The autopsy hasn’t been done yet, but all signs suggest that it was strangulation.” I waited a beat. “You said ‘officially’ he was your student. Is there an ‘unofficially’ you can tell us about?”
“You saw him?” Suzannah Montgomery said.
“Yes.” I saw all of him. “We did.” I wondered how much of him she’d seen.
“You know, then, that he was an extremely attractive young man.” She started to weep again. “What everyone saw was this tall, muscular young man. The hair, the cheekbones. But that wasn’t Austin.” She wiped at her eyes again.
“What was Austin, Professor?”
“Austin was a scared little boy. His father abandoned him and his mother when he was just a child. She died of cancer several years ago. He had no siblings, no close friends, no real family. It was a classic case of a person who looked self-confident and assured but who was exactly the opposite.”
“Can you tell us a little about his interactions with the other professors, the other graduate students?”
“I know that some of the faculty didn’t care for him. He could be an indifferent student. And I did see that from time to time in my own seminars. But I attribute that primarily to his restlessness. He was really quite distracted. He didn’t love literature the way some of our more serious students do. He read well, although perhaps not widely enough. Yet the … the weight of his personal demons kept him from becoming fully engrossed in his studies. I am convinced that, with the right education, the right support, he could have become a significant talent.” She paused, shaking her head and wiping at her nose with a tissue.
“And the other graduate students?”
“Well, I think some of the grad students had the same feeling about him that some of the faculty did: that he wasn’t serious, wasn’t engaged.”
“And the females?”
She smiled sadly. “I think you can guess the answer to that question. He was very popular with the females. A true Byronic hero. Very handsome, very troubled. Therefore irresistible.”
“Did he treat the girls well?”
She closed her eyes for a moment and shook her head back and forth, as if to dismiss the question as too simple. “Did he break some hearts? Yes, I am certain of that. But did he intend to do so? No, I don’t believe that he did. It would be wrong to describe him as a cynical ladies’ man, just collecting trophies. That was not Austin at all. The way I would describe it, when he selected a girl, he focused on her intently. He lavished her with attention. Of course, she would fall for him—quickly and completely. But, inevitably, when he discovered that she would not be able to satisfy his hunger—his very deep needs, I should say—he would turn away, just as suddenly. I suppose that could be interpreted as cruelty. But I would characterize it as honesty.”
“Can you help us understand his relationship with May Eberlein?”
She shook her head. “May is in British, so I’ve never had her in a seminar. I do know that they were together for a time, and, of course, that she is quite attractive, almost an Elle girl.” She smiled, as if that described May’s limitations as much as her beauty. I got the feeling she had thought of that line some time ago. “But I do not believe I have ever had a conversation with her, and therefore I cannot tell you anything about her relationship with Austin.”
“Can you help us with that episode earlier this year, that student in Austin’s freshman class?”
She frowned and nodded her head. “Yes, well, that was quite the topic of discussion around here for some weeks. I know that what he did was wrong. Under no circumstances should an instructor become involved with a student who’s taking her or his course. The power differential is real and substantial. And I do believe he came to realize that.”
“You don’t think he knew it was wrong when he was doing it?”
She shrugged, her palm fluttering in the air, her bracelets jangling. “I really can’t say. I don’t believe Austin’s mind worked in that way. Yes, I suppose he did, on an abstract level. But how many of us are able to think clearly and objectively about the ethical implications of what we are doing, the reality in which we are immersed? That is not how we are made. We are shaped by our experiences—all that we have endured and survived, all that is occurring in our environment at the moment. If you were to ask Austin to write an essay about the topic, I am confident he would have provided a sensitive and thoughtful response. But in the midst of the situation, with a young girl smitten with him, a young girl sexually knowing and willing—in that situation, I’m not sure it’s reasonable to expect that he would act in any way other than he did. They were attracted to each other sexually. The atmosphere was electric, and they acted on their impulses. I suspect ultimately it’s as simple as that.”
“You don’t think it was, you know, that the girl was just a piece of ass?”
Suzannah Montgomery furrowed her brow and looked at me for a long moment. “I know nothing about the girl, Detective, and therefore I’m in no position to comment on whether she was, to use your phrase, ‘a piece of ass.’ But to describe Austin’s motivations in that way would certainly mischaracterize him, as well as caricature everything that was sweet and honorable in him.” She stood up, grabbed her bag, and strode out of the conference room like I’d just said something insensitive.
Chapter 9
“‘A piece of ass’?”
“Hey,” I said, “I might not know what the hell a Byronic hero is, but I can smell bullshit from three feet away. ‘The atmosphere was electric’? Come on. His dick got hard, she spread her legs, he fucked her.”
Ryan smiled. “I believe Professor Montgomery might conclude that you lack the soul of a true poet.”
“Listen, college boy, I know why men screw women.”
“Yeah, yeah, I got that,” he said cheerfully, raising his palms in a gesture of surrender. “And I understand why you said it that way. You threw her off her game, and that’s good.”
“If she wants to think of him as a lost little boy who eases his pain by sticking his ten inches into any nearby cooch, that’s fine with me. But I’m gonna trust my own instincts on this one. The smart money says he was a pussy hound, just like the waitress lives next door said.”
We were sitting at the big table in the conference room in the English department. Ryan stood up and walked over to the stacks of books the grad student had left behind. He picked one up and looked at the cover, then opened it up.
“Thinking of reading about Kate Chopin?” I said.
“I’m thinking of talking to the grad student.” He looked up at the whiteboard to get her name. “Melissa Harmon.”
“To figure out what kind of crazy Suzannah Montgomery is?” I said.
Ryan nodded. “Stay here,” he said. “I’m going to see if I can track her down.” He left his cane behind as he walked over to the door and disappeared into the hall.
I stood up and drifted over to the books. They were from the university library, all about this Kate Chopin woman. I’d gone to my university library half a dozen times to do research on writers, but it had been twenty years and a three or four lifetimes ago. I tried to remember who or what I was writing about, but it was all gone, like almost everything else from those five years that had anything to do with education.
I envied Melissa Harmon, just going to classes, writing papers, teaching freshmen about what a sentence is, and a paragraph. Low stress. If the thing in your life that’s pumping acid into your stomach is a bunch of professors asking you questions about stuff you know better than they do because you’ve been studying it for six months—well, that’s not a bad gig. Not bad at all.
I heard the door open behind me. I turned, expecting Ryan. But it was Melissa Harmon. She stopped abruptly when she saw me looking at her books.
